video marketing

I often write about cool as a cat companies doing hot-as-a-dog things with their content. Everything from hotels getting 200,000 views on an imagine of their penthouse suite, to a Tacoma base auto shop getting 2 million views for a video interview. Video is a powerful link bait weapon and I hope these examples inspire you to utilise this platform more often. If you spread you good video to the right channels, really good things will happen which come in the form of brand buzz, links and social followers.

Before I get into the examples, there are a few things to keep in mind when venturing into this arena. Knowing your market is key, and this means knowing what forums, bloggers and media types are lurking out there. Having relationships built up with these people is only going to make life easier, and is crucial for your business to survive in this day and age. One thing is for sure, the Google rewards are plentiful from a well successful viral video marketing effort!

Photo Credit: Chris Duckett/ZDNet.com.au

Case 1) DC Shoes + Ken Block = Epic WIN

This is how you do viral marketing plain and simple. While this is not exactly a low budget attempt, I’m pleased with how DC Shoes does everything. This is a company that went from being a small skate shoe company to a full blown extreme sports conglomerate. If you haven’t seen this video yet you’re in for the best 9 minutes of your life. You’ll notice the use of Epic Meal Time and other awesome stuff that makes this a sure fire success with nearly 8 million views already.

As for link bait? This one was an ace before it hit the interwebz. Using the intitle: operator shows nearly 200,000 mentions of this on external sites. This of course hit just about every car forum, blog and media outlet in the world and nabbed links not only for DC Shoes, but for Ford as well. All I can say is my hat is off to the production team who put this together, and of course to Ken Block for his bad ass driving skills.

Case 2) How To Sell Make Up Online

We’ve worked with a specific make up company before and one of the best results we got were from getting reviews and tutorials done. There are a ton of talented video bloggers on Youtube and you can really get some reach via this route. This video by Youtube user Michelle Phan has 18 million views for pete’s sake! This was sponsored by no companies but she lists every product used, as well did a bunch of the blogs who wrote about it. This is free exposure those companies are loving I’m sure.

Case 3) Viagra Gets Ballsy

I’m a huge fan of risky marketing, especially in the age of the Internet. There are not rules online and the crazier you go, the better the results are. No press is bad press in almost all situations, so Viagra made use of some cheeky marketing to get a lot of press. Link wise, all you need to do is grab the attention of Adweek.com and you’re going to get all the press you could ever want or need. The amount of money the parent company of Viagra makes is drops in a bucket compared to what it cost to put together this commercial. I imagine they knew ahead of time it would be banned and would make a great PR campaign.

As most of our followers will know I’m a huge motorsports fan, and I’m an even bigger Nissan GTR fan so writing about this was a joy! When it comes to attracting links, buzz and followers within your niche you have to do something unique right? Well in the tuner world the competition is fierce, so standing out is harder th an ever these days. The fine folks at Illtech Auto certainly have done a great job of making noise in just the right way…both on the web and with this monstrous beast of a machine.

So what’s a good lesson to learn from all this? Well them building this amazing car lead to them getting this video done which has nearly peaked to 1.6 million views! You couldn’t ask for better brand exposure, especially for this small tuning company. I took a look closer and this video hit a whole lot of forums and blogs, which in return generated a lot of natural delicious links. There’s not much more that I can write about except get inspired by this and know that one video done right can do you a lot of bloody good!

It’s hard to keep up with all the marketing hype out there, so you know we try and bring you the best. I recently caught a presentation on Vimeo for Addroid. While we usually don’t cover banner (cpm) marketing if at all ever on the Linkbuildr blog, I thought we might as well start with something fresh. Addroid is a new video banner platform that allows you to do it all at a fair price, and by fair I mean much lower than you’d expect elsewhere. I’m pretty interested by it all and I think this form of advertising is really going to be taking off, but that’s really a ‘no duh’ statement. The CEO of the company did a great presentation showcasing how Addroid works, how it all will cost and how you can get started. I also recommend following them on Twitter if you’re interested in more updates.

Big brands have a huge opportunity to have a little fun with their fans. and perhaps give your viral marketing team a breather. We’re all consumers, and some of your loyalists may be armed with an HD video camera, editing skills and the creativity to pull off something amazing. You may find it worth you companies while to dabble in the more socially interactive forms of video marketing. I’ve seen dozens of big brands do commercial contests, and from that I’ve seen videos that rivaled the big firms. Throw in a prize, let the winner receive their 15 minutes of fame and everybody wins.

Every moderate to popular product out there has some sort of consumer base, right? There’s always a good reason why your product has worked its way into the lives of all those people. Youtube is a great platform to let them showcase their own talents, for example let’s take a look at a current trend. Tea is undoubtedly making a come back, especially out here on the west coast. If we can dive deeper into the niche, outside the obvious health tea, let’s take a look at Blooming Tea (aka Flowering Tea). I saw this out there, and while it’s no big budget Hollywood showcase, it’s well done and makes me want the tea pretty bad.

This is a freshly done video so it will be interesting to see where it goes. I think this video is a great example of letting the fans do a little work. This isn’t done for BloomingTea.com by any means, but I certainly would have got in touch with the producer on this one. I would personally be thrilled if I saw something of this quality come from the social web. Hopefully these videos will spread the passion the producer has for you product, and the end goal is to make others feel and understand that same ka-pow!

Force The Creativity Out: Contests

Contests are always a great way to drive social media buzz, snag some links and spread brand awareness. This should almost surely bring out the talented video editors and bring forth a lot of great content. Large brands should have no problem getting a lot of interest and participation, which is why I’m surprised at the lack of social contests. A few good prizes and recognition will go a long way so talk to your marketing department to get the ball rolling!

I always recommend to clients thinking about it to head on over to Youtube, and just have a look at the other brands that have ran a video contest. From there, you can sniff out all sorts of interesting data such as how much social media interaction was achieved, how many links were acquired and other tid bits such as video views and perhaps even an impact of traffic (via Alexa or other sites).

Youtube offers a promoted video feature which should *never* be ignored by any big brand and their typical marketing budget. A good example of a current contest via Youtube is by L’Oreal Canada, and there opening video has nearly half a million views. Those views are nothing to shake a stick at, and you can get the ROI is going to be well worth the time and effort. For the sake if this post, here’s the video with the views;

The last tip we’ll give out here is make sure you identify influential Youtube “stars” within your vertical. L’Oreal has done this and we’ve always done the same for our clients. While your company may not need the help, it is such a fresh approach that won’t cost that much at all. You’d be surprised by how many of these “Youtube Stars” jumped at the chance for the exposure, and of course some free product! Regardless, it won’t cost much and it just builds deeper roots with your fans.

I’m sure most cosmetics companies by now have noticed the sheer amount of makeup tutorials on Youtube, so congrats to them for running yet another contest. I’d recommend to companies interested in all this to keep a close eye on how it all plays out for L’Oreal. If you happen to be a cosmetics company, check out all the things this company is doing online because it’s nothing short of awesome!

Let’s Hear From You

If you’re running a contest or have in the past of this nature, we want to hear from you and I can imagine so do our readers. I wish we here at Linkbuildr have actually done one for our own company, but you know how it is…too much work going on for other people to get anything done for ourselves.

A lot of our clients need, must, want and absolutely have to utilize video marketing. For those who don’t know the costs of producing high quality, high definition video then you’re in for a shock. If you have to ask then…well you should know the rest of that quote. The majority of our clients are of course hotels, real estate agents and ecommerce sites and are always in need of video content. There are many great reasons why you should be marketing with video and I’ll go into that a bit here. First, I’ll try and convince you to try out Animoto’s FREE program and see if it is a must have tool in your arsenal. It’s really too easy not to folks, so don’t miss out!

The video by Rose does a wonderful job of showing you how easy it is to create videos, and how many useful options there are packed into this web software. The main idea is to create picture sideshows in a much more fashionable sense. So when it comes to showcasing products on your online shop, making a slide show of your latest property listing or just showing off the family vacation, it’s a breeze. We recently had a client whip out 25 high quality videos for us to use, all in which showcased his unique products. Guess what we saw?

His first sale by video! The videos were only shared on their Youtube profile, and since they’re unique, they made quite the jump start on their account. This meant his videos were indexing at a rapid rate, the views starting climbing and most importantly his profile with that juicy Youtube link was indexed. We honestly didn’t expect to see a sale come from the videos that quickly, but since they have some very sought after furniture that sale came fast. After further inspection we started to see a few of his videos were already ranking in the top 5 spots for his target keyword, and that meant a onslaught of highly targeted viewers were watching the video. Luckily we make sure each video description includes a link to the direct product, along with a unique to Youtube only description.

So what else? The videos were next used on their social media accounts including their Facebook Page, Twitter account and on their blog. The videos were also added as embeds on the actual product pages which is a great thing to do in an ecommerce shop. Why you ask? Well let me give you two great answers. First up it adds more content to your page, and looks more complete in my opinion. Secondly, we noticed a huge increase in the time-on-site due to the people sitting there and watching the 90 second video. The bounce rate is better, the customer is more happy and our client seemed to be the happiest of all. They were not expecting, or thinking, about the overall benefit to video marketing. Really it’s a no-brainer, but it’s just another tactic in a sea of marketing options one can take advantage of.

There are tons of social video sites out there in which you can use your videos and build a few extra links. These won’t be ultra-awesome authority links, but they’ll add a nice and diverse hit to your link profile. This is something we love to make sure out clients have going on. After a couple months, we also noticed sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and social media scapers embedding our clients videos. We have no problem with this because some included their link, it made the views and ratings go up and that’s key to ranking those videos. For those who don’t know how easy it is to rank Youtube videos for long-tail keywords are missing out!

Video is a standard feature now more than ever and the press release sites are finally catching on. I wanted to round up a few usable resources for everyone to utilize in their next release. I have yet to test the results out myself, but I’ve been helping clients get out video releases more than usual lately. The more your prospective clients or future business partners can see a real person interacting with its audience, the more you will stand out in your industry. I only had a limited amount of time to write today so feel free to add sites in the comments, and read this interview with Greg Jarboe from the video marketing Pros at ReelSEO.

While I have yet to get my rear in gear and do some quality videos for Linkbuildr, I’ve managed to get some done for my various marketing projects on the side. I can tell you now I quickly learned and suck at being in front of a camera, and my video creation skills are lacking to say the least. I recently found Animoto thanks to a client of mine who made some really slick videos for his Ecommerce shop’s products. I’ve been using it ever since and I can safely recommend the product to anyone who doesn’t have the time or skill to make quality videos for marketing. There isn’t a whole lot I can cover here as the video above does the job very well, so just check out the pricing levels which range from free to affordable for most small to large businesses.

A lot of people have already done amazing blog posts on video SEO, and I’m hoping to go a little deeper with this post and give you folks some great resources for not only ranking a video, but distributing it properly. It’s no secret that you can get a Youtube video ranked very easily for very competitive keywords, but there are a whole slough of options you can use to market your video beyond that. There are also ways you can use social media sites to make sure your video gets more views, and hopefully is decided upon by Goolge that it should rank well. Sometimes you can just luck out and name the video after the keyword you’re targeting and hit hold, otherwise you might have to work at it a little.

Doing Video SEO is pretty much the same as link building, at least the mind set and thought process. When I take on a link building campaign for a client who’s site is authoritative in their niche it allows me to attack on a whole other level. Because that site -most likely- has great content, I can hunt down places that would want to link to it. The same principles are in play here, great content should attract links so make sure you’re producing a quality video. If you’re pushing a product, either your own or via an affiliate campaign, the person is going to judge heavily on how your video comes across. This could make or break your campaign, and let’s face it, it won’t have any chance of going viral if it stinks.

Getting Your Videos Out There:

There are hundreds of video sharing websites already and there’s no real need to get your video out to all of them. Keeping track of the top video sharing websites wouldn’t do you any harm, and I usually only submit a clients, or my videos, to the top 10-12 places available. Since there are a ton of them, you can most likely find a few that are based solely around your niche. Thanks to the good folks at Reel SEO, you can find their most awesome and recently updated list of video sharing websites. There’s no need for me to list any here because that will take care of all your video needs, as well keep you busy for hours!

Ok so I’ve got my video ready, now what? Well uploading your videos is the first step, but this can become a very tedious task if you’re doing it a lot. I’ll go into a couple services that might help you with that before going into optimization.

Hey!Spread is my top pick for mass video uploading for a variety of reasons. Now this is not a free service, but that’s fine because it isn’t cheap to run this kind of business. With Hey!Spread you can easily upload your video to the top 20+ social video websites on the net. You can either choose to pick which ones to upload to, or have it automatically grab your videos from Youtube and download them and then proceed to get up to the other video sites. Hey!Spread is also a very well designed site with an interface that a child could use, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting things figured out. Prices for this service are very reasonable and are based on a credit system that you can pay as go, or get billed at the end of the month. A single credit costs .05 and this is the pricing chart from their website;

Tubemogul is another great video distribution and stastical analysis web app that can save you oodles of time. They also have a free version which is defintely worth checking out because you can do up to 100 video deployments a month. This should give you some idea of what this tool can do for you before diving into a larger campaign.

TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.

There are a few things to remember to help target the keywords you’d like your video to rank for such as title, keywords and the description. I know I may be insulting your intelligence with that last sentance, but I just had to make sure….The one thing you might not have thought about when naming and tagging your video properly is that services like Squidoo, Hubpages and other social media sites can pick these videos up. I’ve noticed with a few clients that with the right tagging their videos started showing up all over the place. This really did wonders for their views as well I noticed the videos started showing up in the top 10-20 SERPs.

Social Video Marketing:

There are other ways of attracting views your your video content beyond just uploading to the tube sites, optimizing for SEO and sending to friends. There are a whole stream of interesting and niche video sharing communities that let you showcase your work, build niche channels and spread the good word. All this helps build up your videos and provide them with an edge over your competitors while reaching the top of the SERPs. Just remember that your video content is going to have to be top notch to really make it above and beyond. Let’s take a look at a handful of cool social video sites that can improve your videos stats;

Squidoo of course is a great place to make unique content pages and I sometimes like to make them just to showcase my video work. As well, I mentioned earlier in this post that if you title and tag the video correctly it might show up on other peoples Len’s. This same general principal goes for the other social content creation sites like Hubpages.com and Gather.com. If you’re hitting a hot niche you’re most likely going to have that video picked up.

MeFeedia is a online video sharing community that allows you to submit your embeded videos from other video sites. This is the type of 2.0 site that can help a great deal in getting your video to go viral, or at least get some more hits. You can also network easily by joining groups related to your niche and making sure your video gets added.

Vodpod is a cool video sharing community site that has been growing at a rapid rate and is showing no signs of slowing down. They have embeded videos from over 6000 sites….yes you read that right. The reat thing about Vodpod is not only can you promote your videos, you can also get a link back to the RSS feed providing the content. If you use this wisely you can snag a nice juicy link back to your original content page, whether that be the video itself or your blog. One last little great feature is the ability to create blog widgets with selected videos for your blog, or to share with anyone else!

Videosift is a social video site that takes in popular videos and they’re voted on like Digg or Reddit. The site offers a bunch of features like channels, playlists and a section called Beggar’s Canyon which allows new good videos to get a better chance at votes. This site is also great to push a good video because they receive a large chunk of traffic daily.

Gawkk is another social video site that you allows you to vote popular videos to the frontpage as well share videos with friend and members. All the usual features are there such as channels, groups and user profiles. This social video site is not as popular, and seems to be half a year old but it has been showing growth.

VidsLib is yet another social video site which allows users to vote videos to the front page. There’s nothin too special about this although it used to be ranked sub 10k on Alexa but has seen a massive drop in traffic. I’m not sure if a different site used to be on the domain, but judging by the content that was on the frontpage there’s not a whole lot of user activity anymore.

Yidio is a very cool and relitively new video search engine that is full of only the top quality videos under every niche. They have just dipped under the 10k mark on Alexa so well promoted videos will get your content a good chunk of views. Another great feature of this site is that it is an Adsense sharing social video site, so it never hurts to get the extra cash.

Video Bomb is the last social video voting site I’ll mention before I exhaust my readers. It is pretty much the same as all the rest, has a lot of traffic and has stayed at a steady growth rate over the past year. The only thing I would warn you folks about is there is usually a decent amount of “sexy” videos promoted to the front page. Not really a problem for me but some of you folks might not want to promote on this site.

Paying Your Way In:

This eventually might fall under the Google slap someday but I feel its fine to talk about it because marketing is war! This only works, usually, if you have a really good video to promote so don’t bother trying it otherwise. There is no trick or secret, just hunt down popular users on $insertvideosite and ask them if you could pay them to showcase your video on their channel. Some users have so many followers it’s an easy way to start off the campaign. You could also hire these popular users to create a video for you or do some sort of company review. If you have a product, why not ask if you could send it to them to review. Statistics recently out have stated that 81% of consumers read reviews online about a product before buying…that number will rise so why not have a viral review video going around?

Where To Go From Here:

Well the above list of places to also try and get your video noticed is just a small amount of really popular sites out there. I highly recommend keeping an eye on Mashable, Feedmyapp and Killerstartups for new and upcoming video sites you can promote on. There are also a plethora of options still listed on those sites I didn’t have time to dig out.

If you’re a company or indivual with smaller budget video marketing can be a little discouraging at first, but do your best to keep refining your content and creating powerful social accounts. After a few months of video promotion and adding friends you will start to see when video marketing becomes a very powerful tool. I’ve made so many videos that took days to finish to only have a few hundred views in the end, and others I’ve made goofing off and collect over 2 million views.

Video Marketing Resources:

Reel SEO – The leading blog on video marketing and SEO with so many resources it will make your head spin!

Matt SEO – A leader in the viral video marketing ranks who has been doing online marketing since 1994. If you haven’t heard of Matt, you haven’t been looking hard enough!

Single Throw – If you need a viral video created and distributed to the masses you should probably check out these folks.

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